Providence
by NeoRetro10K
Summary: FentonWorks Ectoplasmic Technologies is failing, with no evidence of ghosts to catch. The government has agreed to grant federal funding to support the Fentons' prototype portal to a hypothetical "Ghost Zone". However, they will only receive payment on the condition that it works. Will the Fentons lose their house? It seems only divine intervention can help get it done on time...


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 **Prov /i\dence**

 _Providence (n.): Divine guidance or care  
_

* * *

Maddie sighed in frustration as she pored over her notes. Wiping sweat from her brow with a gloved hand, she turned her swivel chair away from the desk to face her husband, who had just removed a panel from the metal octagonal archway built into their basement wall.

"If I just mess with the wiring here... re-solder some components there... then bada-bing, bada-boom, we've got a working portal into the Ghost Zone!" Jack boasted, grinning from ear to ear. Though her husband seemed excitable as ever, Maddie noticed the shadowed circles forming beneath the orange-suited man's eyes. She couldn't imagine she looked much different herself.

"Jack, honey," Maddie began hesitantly, glancing at her notes again before rising from her seat. As much as she loved him for his enthusiasm, she knew even he had his limits. She gathered her composure and continued, "We've been at this all night. Shouldn't we get some sleep? After all, a rested mind is a well-functioning one."

Jack's stature seemed to slump a bit, and Maddie almost had time to regret bringing down her lovable goof before he chuckled a bit, and she realized he was actually slouching in relief.

"Whoo boy, I gotta be honest, Mads, we put our brains and our backs into this thing, and it's still got us beat. I wouldn't say no to a little shut-eye!" Suddenly, his face grew pensive, an expression which very few but Maddie ever got the opportunity to see on him. "Wait, when was the deadline again?"

Ah, that was the crux of the matter. As organized as Maddie was, this _was_ a foray into a field that currently remained purely theoretical. One did not simply _choose_ some arbitrary deadline for such an obscure proof-of-concept when so many unexpected pitfalls could come their way. Still, if the Fenton Ghost Portal didn't get done, FentonWorks didn't get its funding.

Maddie shook her head as if to break away from the clutches of a looming Sandman. "Right, the deadline," she muttered. "If I recall, we'll have eleven days starting tomorrow. The problem is - depending on whether or not this one panel is our only problem spot, and if our calculations are actually right this time - we could end up fixing it tomorrow, or a month from now, and we can't afford for it to take longer."

Jack scratched his head, then yawned loudly. "Still, like you said, I don't think we're gonna get any further tonight. Let's get some rest so we can get another crack at it first thing in the morning!" He made some playful boxing punches into the air before continuing, "Then we'll show those spooks who's boss! The government spooks _and_ the ghost spooks!"

Maddie chuckled at her husband's renewed vigor. Following him up the stairs, she couldn't resist taking a moment to turn her head back to face the empty metal tunnel before resuming her ascent and flicking the light off, plunging the lab into darkness.

* * *

She'd made it out of bed and back into the lab earlier than she'd expected. No matter how she'd tried to wake him, Jack remained blissfully in dreamland. No matter. If Maddie could get the portal working, sure, her husband would be a bit disappointed that he didn't fix it himself; but ultimately, he'd be grateful that their problems would be solved.

Maddie was paging through her notes again as she whispered to herself, "Okay, if I can figure out the problem, Jack will be over the moon, _and_ we can ensure our children's future." As she became absorbed in her notebook, she failed to notice the color leaching out of the lab and everything in it.

However, she _did_ notice when she heard a high, somewhat nasally male voice directly behind her. "You wanna ensure your kids' future? I think I might be able to help with that!"

Swiveling the chair around, Maddie came face to face with a being that was clearly not human. To be honest, Maddie thought it looked completely ridiculous. Featuring a top hat, bow tie, and a cane, the entity otherwise resembled a yellow triangle with black spindly limbs, and a single slit-pupiled eye in its center. It somehow spoke without a mouth, its glowing aura brightening and dimming with each syllable.

"Hey there! How ya doin', Safety Goggles? I'm here to make all your current problems go away! Whaddya say, huh? Are you and your husband ready to be world-famous ghost hunters?"

About halfway through this motor-mouthed spiel, Maddie had leapt from her chair and grabbed the nearest prototype ecto-gun to aim at the living triangle.

"Who are you? What do you want?" Maddie asked threateningly.

The triangle didn't appear fazed by this display. Instead, an eyebrow materialized to match the singular eye, contorting in such a way as to suggest a single raised eyebrow on a two-eyed face. He closed his eye and put his free hand to his side to complete the gesture of nonchalance. "Aw, relax, Goggles! The name's Bill! I'm no ghost, and if I was," he opened his eye and pointed to Maddie with his cane, "I certainly wouldn't be parading around in a _genius_ ghost hunter's lab! Go ahead, scan me for ectoplasm with one o' your ghosty thingamajigs!" Bill's arms and legs were now spread-eagle as he continued to float mid-air, as if submitting his entire triangular body to her whims.

Against her better judgment, Maddie complied. Never taking her eyes or her gun off of Bill, she backed up until she reached a table with more prototypes on it. Grabbing a simple unnamed ectoplasm detector, she aimed it at Bill and held the button down until a computerized voice emanated from the handheld machine.

 _"This entity contains - zero - percent ectoplasm."  
_

Maddie set the scanner down, and her grip on the ecto-gun's trigger loosened, if only very slightly.

Twirling his cane by his finger, the triangle's aura flickered in time with his words. "Well, that's that then! No spooky ghosties here!" He shifted in midair to 'lay' on his side with his legs crossed, and one hand propping up his topmost corner. The spinning of his cane in his other hand became more of a lazy flicking. "Just consider me your new best friend!"

Maddie had had enough of Bill's antics by now. Raising the ecto-gun again, she demanded, "And just why would I do that?"

"Oh-ho, ho! Why should _you_ trust _me_? I may not be a ghost, but I'm still an **inter-dimensional being!** " The triangle's voice deepened and echoed, as the center of its eye changed from a slit pupil to an image of a spiral galaxy that gradually faded in color to an ectoplasmic green. After a moment, Bill's eye and his voice both returned to normal. "Let's just say I have _experience_ with portals! What say I help you get _yours_ working, hotshot?"

"I think Jack and I can handle it, thank you," came the terse reply.

"Oh, it's just a simple fix, Safety Goggles!" He orbited to Maddie's other side, and she turned to track him. " _Welllll_ , simple for someone like me. I mean, it's not like I'm a muse whose entire _purpose_ is to just... _hop_ into the minds of geniuses in order to inspire greatness or anything!" Bill threw his hands in the air. "Oh, wait, that's _exactly_ what I am! Buuuut," he shrugged carelessly, " I guess if you wanna risk being late submitting your project for funding, that's up to you!"

Maddie growled wordlessly, but the ecto-gun in her hand wavered.

"Look, you're a smart girl. Smart enough to get the portal working on your own for sure! But," the eye changed again, this time to an analog clock face, "the clock's ticking, Goggles. I have no doubt you can do it yourself, but are you sure that'll be _before_ your deadline? With my help, you can get the portal working even _faster_! After all, 'teamwork makes the dream work,' they say! Besides," Bill's eye literally telescoped from his body as if to look more closely at Maddie, "just _look_ at those circles under your eyes! Sleep much, Safety Goggles?" The telescope retracted and became an eye once again. "Reading the same notes over and over and over and _over_ again can sure strain your eyes! You could do with a break from these complicated calculations! Why don'tcha just let ol' Billy take over for ya?"

Maddie rubbed her forehead. At this point, she'd be glad to do anything to rid herself of this grating voice. "What exactly do _you_ get out of this anyway? If you're as powerful as you say, there isn't anything I can give you that _you'd_ find valuable."

Bill wagged a finger in front of her. " _Au contraire!_ That's French for, 'you silly goose!'" The triangle giggled. "Of _course_ you can give me something in return! In fact, I'd be absolutely _flattered_!"

Now his cane was a Chinese folding fan, and he waved it at himself airily. "For your information, there aren't any ghosts in my dimension either. I'd heard rumors of the Ghost Zone from other inter-dimensional travelers, but I've _never_ had the means to get there myself! So, after we've gotten the portal working..."

The folding fan turned back into a cane, which was then pointed at Maddie.

"All I want from you is the first ghost outta your portal!"

She stared. "... That's it? That's all you want?" Maddie's gun lowered completely in her shock.

"Consider it a favor from one curious mind to another!"

"So," the blue-suited woman pondered, "you'll be... experimenting on it, then?"

Bill rubbed his hands together. "Oh, it'll definitely be put to the **test**!"

Maddie hesitated. Then, she thought of her family - broke and pushed out of their home for want of that government grant. She steeled herself. "So... how is this going to work?"

The inter-dimensional triangle chuckled. "All you have to do is shake my hand, and then we'll have ourselves a **deal!** " Bright blue flames encompassed the triangle's hand as he held it out in front of him.

Maddie bit her lip and glanced once more at the metal tunnel. "The portal will get done? We won't get foreclosed?"

"Mmmhmm..." Bill leaned towards the woman eagerly, his triangular body stretching and retracting vertically to give the impression of a head nodding.

The triangle's noodle-like appendage was met by a black shoulder-length glove. Blue flames momentarily spread painlessly between the two hands before extinguishing.

Suddenly, Bill released Maddie's hand, and he rose even further into the air; Maddie stepped back in surprise.

"Alright, now just sit back and watch this, Safety Goggles! You're in for a real treat!" Bill pointed to Maddie's notes, drawing her own gaze toward them. When the living triangle snapped his fingers, several loose papers floated into the air, and Maddie watched in awe as the long-dried lines of ink impossibly rearranged themselves into new formulas, equations, and diagrams. Then, the papers rearranged themselves back into their proper order before the pile slammed down flat onto the desk. "Aaaaand, there ya go! All you needed was to look at things with fresh _eye_!"

Maddie rushed to the desk to flip through the newly recompiled notebook in wonder. "This... This is brilliant! How did you find the coefficient of spectral entanglement? And, and you even reconciled my equations with Rosen's theorems!"

Bill casually adjusted his bow tie. "What can I say, kid? I've been around for a really **long time!** Enough that I just kinda picked up a few things!"

A thought occurred to Maddie. "If you can do all that, why did you need me at all?"

"Like I said, more general experience with portals themselves rather than with ghosts specifically!" the triangle shrugged. "And now that that's done, you _might_ wanna finish that beauty sleep, Safety Goggles, or the shadows under your eyes are gonna make you look like you've been wearing those goggles your whole _life_!"

Before Maddie could respond in surprised indignation, Bill tipped his hat to her, and reality itself shattered like a mirror.

* * *

 **Author's Note : Who's got two thumbs and was too lazy to save their documents anywhere else except on this very website, leaving them to be automatically deleted while he was gone for _multiple years?_ d('v'd) ᵀʰᶦˢ ᵍᵘʸʸʸʸʸ...**

 **Anyway, I wanted to write more, and I have vague plans, but I think this can stand on its own for now. I might come back to it, I might not. Ah, writer's block, thou art a heartless witch.**

 **EDIT: One review prompted me to want to clarify a few things:**

 **At the moment, Maddie is sleep-deprived, and not using her best judgment, so she doesn't think through everything that could possibly go wrong with the deal - pretty much exactly like when Dipper became Bill's puppet.**

 **Also, Bill said he'd help to get it working, but I think the wording is just vague enough not to specify how much help he'll give, or how directly. I believe that, in the alternate universe where this crossover exists, Maddie and Jack's original calculations wouldn't be enough to even start it, with or without Danny's interference; and Bill takes the opportunity to subvert the design of the portal by adding a "safety" breaker - one that has a flaw in the wiring.**

 **See, my headcanon for there being an "ON" switch inside the portal is that it was never really meant to be the main power switch at all - rather, it was a safety breaker, meaning that "ON" meant that the SAFETY was on, NOT the power, except that the wires got crossed, so the power signal is inverted, thus effectively turning it into an apparent "ON" switch even though it wasn't meant to be.**

 **How did the wires get crossed? Well, in this universe, I think Bill crossed the wires in the design, and when Maddie and Jack grow too excited about getting the portal working, they will rebuild and rearrange the portal's components to match the new blueprints, without stopping to examine the changes too closely. Yes, it's an obvious thing to miss, but no one's ever said the Fentons aren't occasionally absent-minded, especially when overly excited.**

 **As for romantic pairings, I don't have any specific plans. I don't even know if I'll include any Gravity Falls characters besides Bill, who I just had to try to write after finding myself intrigued by his wacky mannerisms. I hope I did Bill's character justice, as this piece was originally a character study on him.  
**

 **Finally, I think that Bill CAN outright lie leading up to the deal if only to mislead Maddie into taking it. It's just the wording of the deal itself that Bill has to fulfill, even if he words his deals vaguely so he can technically fulfill them the way he wants to. So, when he says he has no experience in the Ghost Zone, he's lying.**

 **I think after his "death" in Stan's mind, his invocation of the Axolotl allowed his spirit to manifest in some strange limbo in between the Nightmare Realm and the Ghost Zone, so he can now see the Ghost Zone even if he's stuck mostly in the Nightmare Realm. This also means he can still enter the dreams of others, specifically Maddie in this case. He can't exactly control Maddie directly since that wasn't a deal he made with her, but perhaps this dream of hers may have caused a bout of sleepwalking and sleep-drawing in the real world, allowing Bill's changes to the design to happen in reality as well. It's not direct control, but it's still enough influence to get Maddie to act. I know that in practice, it seems like there's no difference, but it's there, even if the difference is a subtle one.  
**


End file.
